From: Russet McMillan Subject: 3.5m Night Log 20061231 Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2007 06:54:16 -0700 (MST) Apache Point Observatory 3.5m Telescope Night Log Sunday, December 31, 2006 ACTUAL ASTRONOMER OBSERVER(S) INSTRUMENT START FINISH ------------------------------------------------------------------- D.York D.York SPIcam, 17:15 06:30 NICFPS INST SCHED(TWILIGHT) WEATH EQUIP OBS DAY NOT USED I/ROW/DN START FINISH D B D B D B USE D B --------------------------------------------------------------------- UC10/R 18:05 06:08 0 0 0 0.3 0.6 9.8 0 0 0 note: scheduled times listed include instrument change time ------------- ACTIVITY LOG -------------- 1st Half Observing Specialist: G.Saurage Sunny and clear! Happy New Year! We started off with SPIcam and then switched to NICFPS at about 19:30. NICFPS checked out fine tonight but then later on (once it was mounted on the telescope) all the images were coming out blank. I ended up restarting the NICFPS program on the ICS and reconnecting to the hub and init expose. Good but somewhat variable seeing all 1st half. 2nd Half Observing Specialist: R.McMillan Second half was clear with good to excellent seeing (down to 0.60 arcsec, better than we've seen in a few months as far as I know). Temperature was rather variable, requiring constant attention to focus. Everything went well except when the observer (running TUI v1.2) tried to cancel his dither scripts and ran into a bug, which then interfered a little with my stopping the script (running v1.3a11). When I was the only one sending stop commands, it worked fine. At the beginning of second half, the observer reported elongated images. After some study I concluded this was an azimuth tracking difficulty even though he was in the SW portion of the sky, not usually difficult for the azimuth motors. I tried some careful adjustments to the az tracking parameters, and one of these changes (MC.POS.ERR.SCALE from 0.08 to 0.12) was so successful that I made it permanent. Later observations in the NE, N, and medium-high southern transit also showed good tracking, but we didn't test really high southern transits or near the az direction reversal. ------- FAILURE LOG ------- PROG INST FAILURE MODE TIME (SEDFNVOG) TI/SHU START FINISH DESCRIPTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- UC10 N I/S 19:25 19:45 NICFPS images all blank ---------------- FOCUS LOG --------------- Time Instrument Focus Az El Temp Strc Prim Sec Air filt FWHM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 17:40 SPIcam 175(168) 213 73 1.0 1.9 1.3 1.0 1.3 I 1.0 18:25 SPIcam 0(-14) 219 71 1.4 1.7 1.1 0.9 1.4 I 1.0 19:50 NICFPS -175(177) 297 36 0.2 1.1 0.6 0.5 0.6 - 1.3 21:20 NICFPS -175(118) -27 56 0.1 0.2 -0.5 -0.5 0.0 K 1.1 22:50 NICFPS -25(305) -58 42 1.8 0.2 -0.4 0.2 1.2 H 0.9 ------------- WEATHER LOG ---------------- Wind Precip.or Time Temp F Dewp F MPH Direction Dust Sky Conditions ------------------------------------------------------------------- 16:02 37 5 3 8 (N) 46 clear none 17:02 36 0 11 351 (N) 45 clear none 18:02 35 -3 10 355 (N) 49 clear none 19:02 35 0 8 327 (NNW) 72 clear none 20:02 33 0 11 6 (N) 53 mstly clr none 21:02 33 2 7 340 (NNW) 78 mstly clr none 22:02 32 3 6 343 (NNW) 42 clear none 23:02 35 1 2 257 (WSW) 48 clear none 00:02 32 -1 5 181 (S) 47 clear none 01:02 34 0 5 188 (S) 68 clear none 02:02 35 0 9 182 (S) 34 clear none 03:02 32 -1 9 180 (S) 58 clear none 04:02 33 -1 11 179 (S) 47 clear none 05:02 33 -1 12 177 (S) 36 clear none 06:02 32 0 12 178 (S) 52 clear none Note: the wind was coming from the azimuth listed. The convention used is north=0 degrees, east=90 degrees. The dust count is particles > 1u per 0.1 cubic feet. TELESCOPE STATUS Telescope drives operational. Current TCC version: 2.8.5 Current TUI version: TUI 1.2